In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In Monday's post, I noted that I wasn't going to cover the conventional wisdom on the Strait of Hormuz, because it was too big a subject, and the situation was fluid. But yesterday, I ran across a Substack essay that I think provides a pretty good snapshot of the thinking over the past weekend : At midnight Greenwich Mean Time on 5 March 2026, seven of the twelve International Group Protection and Indemnity clubs that collectively insure roughly 90% of the world’s ocean-going tonnage executed identical cancellation notices for war-risk coverage across the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and Iranian territorial waters. . . . In that instant, seven letters accomplished what the entire Iranian navy could not. . . . By every traditional metric of military dominance, the campaign is succeeding. Yet the Strait remains commercially paralysed. . . . [T]he 31 autonomous IRGC provincial commands that replaced centralised authority after the decapitation strikes create a coun...